It's Time
by Kelmin
Summary: Chet has a decision to make. Inspired by this prompt from Laughing Librarian, to whom I am grateful for the idea: "The quiet consumed him. He gazed into the flickering light and thought... Who is 'he' and why is he alone? Why is it/he so quiet? Where is he and what is he contemplating?"


**It's Time**

.

The quiet consumed him. He gazed into the flickering light and thought about what he'd been trying to avoid for weeks now, maybe even months. That's why he'd come out here, alone: to finally make himself think about it.

Chet poked the campfire with a long, sturdy stick, causing a fire-weakened log to crumble and fall into the pile of white-hot embers beneath the carefully-constructed pile of less-burnt logs that still held their shape. His knee, the one that had been troubling him lately on the job, cracked as he shifted his weight and settled back on his heels in front of the fire.

Forty had come and gone a few years ago, along with the feeling that he could keep up with the younger guys; keep up with the changing times. He'd put in almost twenty-five years on the job. Nobody could or would fault him for making the decision now.

When he was younger, he'd hoped he'd finish on an engineer's pension—or maybe even a captain's, though he'd always kind of known that wouldn't happen. But there was no disgrace in his decision not to pursue a promotion—not once he'd admitted to himself that where it was really at for him was being up close and personal with the fire. Lots of guys felt that way, and it was a shame, really, that there wasn't some mechanism for promotion within the ranks of regular firefighter, for guys like him who wanted to stay on the front lines, and who had years—no, decades—of experience (and he had to laugh at himself for allowing himself to think the next word) and wisdom to offer.

The incident on his last shift was a real wake-up call. It could've happened to him, but instead, it was Fielder who collapsed, falling to his knees, gray-faced and gasping for breath in a way that could mean only one thing. He'd survived—his heart attack had been a mild one—but he wouldn't be coming back to active duty.

But there's no such thing as "mild" when you're inside a burning building. The thing that had saved Fielder was timing, pure and simple. Ten minutes sooner, and his partner would've been dragging him out of the building by the straps of his air pack, and the outcome surely wouldn't have been as good.

Despite—or maybe because of—years of fad diets and yoyoing weight (he tried to keep it off, he really did), Chet's doctor said his weight was borderline, his cholesterol was terrible, and his blood pressure was too high. Some of the best blood pressure drugs were off limits to firefighters (you can't have the side effect of being prone to problems with heat exchange if you're wearing this modern turnout gear that's like an ironing board cover inside a raincoat inside a layer of stiff Kevlar), so he was stuck with one of the less good ones.

The doctor also suggested that the disrupted sleep patterns that were part of his job contributed to his high blood pressure, and Chet wasn't gonna argue with that—a sleepless or disrupted night, followed by a day of exhaustion, followed by a reasonably normal day, then repeat—that was a game for younger men. Or women.

As a single guy, he could make it, easily enough, on his pension, but he wasn't counting on the cost of living staying where it was. If he took his cousin up on the proposition to start up a second location of his uncle's restaurant together, he'd be making a pretty decent living. He could have a regular schedule, though still not a nine-to-five job, and maybe pull his health together.

He wasn't too old, he knew, to get married and maybe even have a couple of kids. Roy's two kids were grown adults now, as were Hank Stanley's, so he'd be a generation behind in that respect. But he wasn't worried about that.

Not worried.

Chet sat on a tree-stump next to the fire ring, and thought about that phrase. Thought about what it would mean to stop doing a job that he loved doing, but start being able to wake up every morning and not have to force himself not to worry about how he was getting too old to do the only thing he really knew how to do. Not to worry about dying in the line of duty, in one of the zillions of ways that could happen. Not to worry about the stress of being under the command of someone almost ten years younger than him, who Chet didn't think was ready for the job.

He and Captain Dijkstra had come to an uneasy understanding over the last six months. They'd never be friends, not even after Chet retired (and did he really just let himself think that word? He did.) But they'd each found ways to respect each other, despite their mutual distrust.

He'd kept in touch with everyone from what he considered the heyday of his career—those six years with the same guys, minus one year for Captain Stanley, at Station 51. Each of those men had moved on in ways that kept them out of the fires. Marco had retired after putting in twenty years, and he and his wife and kids had moved to Oregon, where his wife taught school, and he ran a hardwood flooring business. Mike Stoker, who had been the first one to leave their tight-knit crew when he was promoted to captain, had retired before any of them, after a dozen or so years in command at various stations. Hank Stanley had moved way up into the brass, and was being considered for an Assistant Chief position. Roy—well, Roy was the superstar of all of them, running the fire department's side of the county's paramedic program.

It was Johnny's retirement party though, just a few weeks ago, that had planted the seed, Chet realized. A seed that had been watered by some heavy thinking, a healthy dose of denial, and then the sobering incident with Fielder. Johnny, seemingly the most indestructible of all of them, the one who could bounce back from anything, the one who at forty was still getting carded in the bars, the one who probably could still fit into clothes he wore in high school—his retirement was the one that really got to Chet.

It had come out of the blue, from Chet's perspective. Johnny had been a captain for what seemed like ages, and it had never even occurred to Chet that the guy would ever retire. But when he got a call from Gage a couple months ago, telling him the news and inviting him to the party, Chet was profoundly unsettled.

Johnny hadn't given him a clear explanation—but he also didn't seem like he was trying to hide anything.

"I dunno, Chet—it just seemed like it was time," Johnny had said, when they'd met up for a beer a week or so before the retirement party.

"What are you gonna do next?" Chet had asked.

Johnny had shrugged. "Just see what happens, I guess."

As Chet stared into a controlled instance of the entity that it was his life's work to master, he realized that he'd already made his decision, well before he went on this solo camping trip. He'd thought the purpose of the trip was to make a decision—the choices being "now" or "not quite yet"—but he suddenly understood that the journey's purpose was, in fact, to serve as a ritual that would allow him to admit to himself what he had already decided.

Gazing into the flames, he allowed himself to say it out loud:

"It's time."


End file.
